A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [6]
He quickly became obsessed by the ruined fences, and a few weeks later he had borrowed a car, driven out of the city, and begun to search out remnants of rails, boulders, and stumps, sometimes tramping for hours through swamps and scrub bush following a line of decaying posts or a path defined by rusting, broken wire. He began to think of fences as situations rather than structures. Like an act of God or a political uprising, they seemed to him to mark the boundaries of events rather than territories. And like events, he felt that these fences had come into being as a result of a great deal of energy, flourishing on the edges of labour for a few hard decades, then collapsing onto a ground whose only crop now was an acre of windblown weeds.
Reading anything he could find on the subject, he learned about wedges and stakes, and about the much-coveted long, true split of cedar that resulted in six good rails to a log. He learned about rails that rested on notched “sleepers” and how those rails were fixed in place by wire. He learned about strong fences withstanding the assault of bulls and about weak fences that had permitted entire herds to drift into a neighbour’s alfalfa. For a time he wished he had been born in the nineteenth century and had been appointed to a team of official “fence-viewers.”
He attempted to reconstruct the frail, disappearing remnants of the fences on the indoor/outdoor carpeting of a city art gallery, had lugged boulders and fence wire, branches and decaying rails into the space and had made six lines that moved from the entrance to the far end of the space. Made uncomfortable by any kind of verbal explanation, he had not stapled the customary lyrical passages to the walls so that beyond the announcement “Fence Lines,” which the dealer had pasted on the front window of the gallery, there had been no verbal apology for the exhibition. The black-and-white photographs on the walls of what he privately called “similar structures in the wild” had sold to some private and, in a few cases, small public collections, and had been the making of his reputation as a young artist to watch. The sense of loss that he felt in the face of decay, of disappearance had gone unnoticed, uncommented upon by the critics. But it was this loss that he had taken with him on his latest trip out of the city, to the town of Kingston and across the ice-filled lake, the ice-choked mouth of the huge river, to the shores of Timber Island.
Jerome stood at the very edge of the island, looking at the ice, thinking of Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass, about how the legendary Smithson had transported pieces of glass to the New Jersey site he had chosen, had heaped them into a haphazard shape, then waited for the sun to come out so that the structure would leap into the vitality he knew existed when broken glass combined with piercing light. Smithson had been mostly concerned with mirrors at the time and yet had chosen glass rather than mirrors, as if he had decided to exclude rather than to reflect the natural world. According to something Jerome had read, however, Smithson had come to believe the glass structure he had created was shaped like the drowned continent of Atlantis. Perhaps this explained his need to use a material that would suggest the transparency of water. But Jerome was drawn to the brilliance and the feeling of danger in the piece: the shattering of experience and the sense that one cannot play with life without being cut, injured. The sight of ice at this moment and in this place, ice rearing up against the shore of the island, the disarray of the arbitrary constructions that were made by its breakup and migration, seemed like a gift to Jerome, as if